Where My Heart Used to Beat

So much of what I’d heard and read as a young man excited in me the belief that enduring sexual passion, romantic ‘love’, was the highest type of interaction – perhaps indeed the highest state of being – to which a human could aspire. How lamentably I had failed. How seldom had I felt the weight of all my joy and all my safety to hang on the say-so of another. On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks - an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer - is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host is Alexander Pereira, a man who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does. Their search for the past takes the reader through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally - unforgettably - back into the trenches of the Western Front. This moving novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks' most remarkable book yet; a haunting tale of war, love and loss. ‘This is a terrific novel, humming with ideas, knowing asides, shafts of sunlight, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy.’ – The Telegraph An author who has achieved an enviable blend of literary merit and huge commercial success across a varied and experimental career, Sebastian Faulks is a critic and award-winning author best-known for his French trilogy, including the tour-de force novel of the First World War, Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion D’or and the classic novel of the French Resistance Charlotte Gray, as well as contemporary dramas Engleby and A Week in December.